The Night Shift Nobody Applies For

It is 2:30 in the morning.

The rest of the house is asleep.

Even the neighbourhood dogs, who usually hold important committee meetings at this hour, seem to have adjourned for the night.

Meanwhile, I am sitting in my living room with the television quietly glowing in the corner, scrolling through YouTube with the optimism of someone who believes that the next video might finally be the one worth watching.

I have already rejected documentaries about ancient civilizations, interviews with economists, two videos on tractor repairs, something about building a tiny house in the woods, and a man who claims he can explain the meaning of life in under eight minutes.

Apparently, even insomnia has standards.

Eventually, I gave up searching for something to watch and decided to write instead.

Perhaps that is what insomnia really is.

Not the inability to sleep.

The inability to stop thinking.

I have always found it fascinating how different the world feels after midnight.

Questions that seem perfectly manageable during the day suddenly become complicated.

Small decisions demand board meetings.

Old memories, long forgotten, quietly reintroduce themselves.

Somewhere between two and three in the morning, the brain develops an astonishing talent for replaying conversations from ten years ago, usually remembering the one sentence you wish you had never said.

It is a remarkable skill.

Entire meetings disappear from memory by lunchtime, yet somehow your mind can retrieve an embarrassing moment from 1998 in perfect high-definition.

Night has a peculiar way of slowing everything except our thoughts.

Perhaps that is why so many writers, musicians and philosophers seem to have been friends with insomnia.

The world becomes quieter.

The phone stops ringing.

Emails stop arriving.

Expectations go to sleep.

All that remains is you... and the conversation inside your own head.

Sometimes that conversation is pleasant.

Other times it behaves like an auditor who has finally located every decision you have ever questioned.

I suspect most of us know that feeling.

You begin by thinking about tomorrow's meeting.

Five minutes later, you are wondering whether you should have taken a different career twenty years ago.

Another ten minutes pass and somehow you are researching the migration habits of penguins.

Don't ask me how the brain gets there.

It simply does.

Insomnia has very few traffic rules.

As I sit here tonight, I find myself wondering whether sleepless nights are entirely an enemy.

I wouldn't wish them on anyone.

The body needs rest.

The mind certainly does.

But I also wonder whether some of life's quieter reflections would never happen if every night unfolded exactly according to schedule.

Some of my best ideas have arrived when everyone else was asleep.

So have some of my worst.

The difficulty is telling them apart before sunrise.

Morning has rescued me from more than one brilliant midnight idea that turned out to be wonderfully foolish after coffee.

Age has also changed the way I think about sleep.

When I was younger, staying awake until three in the morning felt adventurous.

Today it feels more like entering into an agreement with tomorrow's version of myself... one that tomorrow's version rarely appreciates.

Perhaps that is one of the small ironies of growing older.

As children, we fight sleep with remarkable determination.

As adults, we negotiate with it like desperate diplomats.

"Just six uninterrupted hours," we plead.

"Surely that's not too much to ask."

Sometimes it agrees.

Sometimes it politely declines.

I don't know what keeps everyone else awake.

For some, it is work.

For others, finances.

Health.

Family.

Loneliness.

Hope.

Or simply a mind that has not yet learned where the off switch is hidden.

Whatever the reason, there is something strangely comforting in knowing that somewhere, in another house, another city, perhaps even another continent, someone else is also staring at the ceiling wondering why sleep missed their address tonight.

Perhaps they, too, have ended up on YouTube.

Perhaps they have already watched the documentary about ancient civilizations that I skipped.

If so, I hope it was worth it.

As for me, I think I have finally found something worthwhile to do with this sleepless night.

Not because I solved insomnia.

Far from it.

But because I was reminded that even restless nights can produce quiet reflections worth carrying into the morning.

The clock now insists that it is much later than when I began writing.

Maybe sleep has finally decided to forgive me.

If it hasn't, YouTube still has several million videos waiting.

Although, judging by tonight's experience, I will probably reject most of them.

Some nights refuse to give us sleep. Sometimes they offer us something else: a moment to listen to the thoughts that daylight is usually too busy to hear.